Cotecna, the international trade inspection group, has unveiled its E-dox solution in response to a growing demand for a fast and secure way to speed up trade transactions.
The solution was launched just weeks after the United Nations' official endorsement of the latest version of Uniformed Customs and Practice for Documentary Credits (UCP 600).
Large volumes of sensitive trade paperwork traveling physically by land, sea and air, open to breaches of security and sometimes never reaching their intended destination are issues that have long been a problem for major trading houses. But Cotecna’s E-dox system negates all of these pitfalls, and the costs that they incur, by enabling almost instantaneous and highly secure electronic movement of paper records and certificates between users.
E-dox is free of charge and is entirely eUCP600-compliant, enabling documents to remain as the ‘unique’ UCP original even if retransmitted – a process which saves time and money when documents are lost or stolen and might previously have had to be resent by hand.
“Readily available information irrespective of time zones is crucial. Time is money and electronic transmission of documents enables traders and bankers to substantially improve the documentary process,” says Vincent Minna, director of finance and trade execution at Bunge SA. “We don’t have to wait for paper documents to arrive, payments can be made more rapidly, and systems like E-dox significantly reduce the risk of documents being lost, stolen or forged.”
Developed in-house by Cotecna’s trade finance and IT specialists, E-dox enables documents to be checked and authenticated 24/7 at each stage of the chain.
“The problems associated with goods arriving before documentation is another factor facing traders, particularly on shorter trade routes”, says Matthieu Delorme, COO of Cotecna Commercial Activities. “E-dox cures this issue because it is capable of providing an instantaneous, secure and compliant response to the e-UCP.”
E-dox also saves on space as well as time. Easy to handle, documents can be circulated with ease, re-named and stored like any other electronic document, and with no storage space needed, the solution avoids paper archiving.
E-dox is not restricted to certificates; the solution can transform any document into a highly secure electronically transmissible document. Eventually all UCP documents can be transformed into an E-dox package, Cotecna says.
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